It is widely accepted that leadership affects the mental health of those being led. What has been far less clear is which leadership styles matter most, and whether different styles have different effects on positive versus negative aspects of mental health. Montano and colleagues (2023) addressed this through a meta-analysis comparing seven distinct leadership styles across 53 studies and 93,470 participants.

The Styles Under Examination

The review compared transformational leadership (inspiring and motivating through vision and values), transactional leadership (managing through reward and correction), laissez-faire leadership (passive, hands-off), task-oriented leadership (focused on goals and structure), relations-oriented leadership (focused on interpersonal support), destructive leadership (hostile, undermining, or abusive), and leader-member exchange (the quality of the individual relationship between leader and follower) (Montano et al., 2023).

What the Evidence Shows

The findings draw a clear distinction between what harms and what helps.

For overall mental health and its negative dimensions, including affective symptoms, stress, and health complaints, transformational and destructive leadership emerged as the strongest predictors (Montano et al., 2023). The destructive leadership finding is perhaps unsurprising: hostile, undermining, or abusive leadership is consistently damaging. The transformational finding is more interesting. Transformational leadership, often treated as straightforwardly positive, appears to have a particularly strong relationship with mental health outcomes in both directions, suggesting its emotional intensity cuts both ways depending on how it is implemented.

For positive mental health outcomes, including wellbeing and psychological functioning, the strongest predictors were relations-oriented and task-oriented leadership, with transformational leadership again featuring but less dominantly (Montano et al., 2023). Providing interpersonal support and clear structure, it turns out, does more for employee flourishing than inspirational vision alone.

Why It Matters

Leadership development has long focused heavily on transformational leadership as the gold standard. This meta-analysis complicates that picture. It suggests that fostering positive mental health and preventing negative mental health may require somewhat different leadership emphases, and that the relational and task-oriented dimensions of leadership deserve more attention in development programmes than they typically receive (Montano et al., 2023).

For organisations, the destructive leadership findings carry an equally direct implication: the single most protective thing a workplace can do for employee mental health may simply be to identify and address leaders whose behaviour is actively harmful.|

Reference

Montano, D., Schleu, J. E., & Hüffmeier, J. (2023). A meta-analysis of the relative contribution of leadership styles to followers’ mental health. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 30(1), 90–107. https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518221114854